continuum
Wonderful... so are we going through the motions... or are we breaking new ground?

–Alec to Kagame, Endtimes

"Time is a very sensitive matter, and manipulating it can change the very fabric of history."

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There are multiple timelines in Continuum. As revealed by Catherine, whenever time travel occurs, a new timeline is created. To help with this explanation, Catherine used the metaphor of a tree. When someone travels back in time, a new branch of the tree grows and events can play out in drastically different ways. Timelines, or branches, can also collapse if too much damage occurs to them.


First Timeline

Note that the "First Timeline" is the first timeline from the perspective of Kiera Cameron and the Liber8 terrorists as presented in the first episode of the TV series. It might not, objectively, have been the "original" timeline, as it is later revealed that there have been other time travel incidents.

c1995

2008

2019

2028

c2030

c2035

c2037

2040

c2041

2057

2058

c2062

c2065

2069

2070s

2076

2077

c2140's

Second Timeline

c1140's

1975

1992

2012

2013

Third Timeline

2013

Between 2013 and 2039

2039

Fourth Timeline

2013

Fifth Timeline

2013

Changing timelines and time paradoxes

The exact effects of time travel are poorly understood. Essentially, from what the Freelancers have indicated, time travel into the past creates an entirely new, alternate timeline which branches off from the original.

It is unknown if the new timeline overwrites the original timeline, or if they branch off from each other, and therefore the original timeline continues to "exist" in some form. The difference is crucial: if the Liber8 terrorists from the First Timeline want to prevent the rise of a corporate-dominated future, they would want to overwrite the past sixty years of history. The other possibility is that by traveling back to the past, they did not affect the First Timeline...it simply went on existing without them, while they created the Second Timeline, a duplicate of the First Timeline (until the point when they arrived in the past and started altering it). Even if Liber8 succeeded in ensuring that the Corporate Congress never formed in the 2077 of the Second Timeline, the 2077 of the First Timeline (if it still exists as a separate branch) might still be dominated by the Corporate Congress. As a result, all of Liber8's attempts to change history within the First Timeline would be futile.

This is what allows time travelers to maintain the Novikov self-consistency principle (which Alec Sadler directly referred to in Season 2). When a time traveler enters the past, they create a Second Timeline. Even if they kill their own grandfather in the Second Timeline, this is not a time paradox, because they are not killing their own grandfather back in the First Timeline, but an exact duplicate created along with the rest of the Second Timeline, as a direct result of their time travel. Kiera Cameron speculates that she and Liber8 have already changed the timeline in so many ways both drastic and subtle that their future selves may no longer be born, yet they continue to exist in the Second Timeline.

Meanwhile, changes to the past which prevent the development of the time travel machine used to send the traveler back to the past in the first place are apparently too much of a paradox for the timeline to sustain, causing the entire universe of that timeline to collapse. When Alec Sadler in 2013 used the time machine to go back one week, he created a Third Timeline...while removing Alec Sadler from the Second Timeline, functionally equivalent to if Alec had been killed. As a result he never lived to 2077, to create SadTech, and to spur development of the very same time machine which was later sent back to 2013 which he then used to "kill" (remove) himself from that timeline. The resulting paradox destroyed the Second Timeline.

The resulting contradiction is difficult to explain: a time traveler can kill their "grandfather" in the Second Timeline because it is really a duplicate of their actual grandfather from the First Timeline. In contrast, a time traveler cannot kill the inventor of the time machine (Alec Sadler) in the Second Timeline...even though it was the inventor in the First Timeline who created the specific time machine they used.

Alternate futures

It appears that each new timeline does not overwrite the one a time traveler originated in, but creates an entire new timeline/universe: an exact duplicate of their original timeline up to the point when they enter. For example, when Liber8 from the First Timeline traveled back in time to 2012, they did not go back to the "2012 of the First Timeline". They essentially made an entirely separate, branching timeline/universe. At the very point they arrived, the "2012 of the Second Timeline" was an exact duplicate of the timeline/universe from the "2012 of the First Timeline"...though it instantly started branching away from this due to their presence, not to mention their active attempts to alter how they knew history developed...or rather, would have developed had they not intervened. As a result, the "2013 of the Second Timeline" was already quite different from the "2013 of the First Timeline", with Liber8-inspired anarchist gangs, political assassinations that would drastically alter future events, etc.

It is unknown if travel between alternate branching timelines is possible. Specifically, even if Kiera Cameron's family continues to exist in the First Timeline (in the year 2077), she may never be able to travel back from the Second Timeline to the First Timeline.

From the perspective of 2012, there are at least five alternate timelines by the end of Season 3:

Assuming that all of these branches are separate but co-exist, the four surviving branches are:

This is theoretically what should have happened, but the TV series is unclear: it treats Bran Tonkin's "dark future" of 2039 as a consistent alternate timeline. Bran's own time travel should have created yet another branch from the Third Timeline, then the combat armored soldiers from the future making yet another incursion should have made a Fifth Timeline (ultimately thwarted by Kiera and Alec, resulting in a peaceful future).

On the other hand, given that Third Timeline Kellog already had access to the First Timeline's time travel technology, he could have spent the next 20 years refining it with a better understanding of temporal mechanics. In short, future-Kellog may have perfected time travel to the point that sending Brad Tonkin back in time was a stable time-loop, as was sending the soldiers back, so that the end result by the series finale is really one combined "Fourth Timeline" after Third Timeline Kellog is defeated. A counterpoint to this is that the elder "Third Timeline Kellog" from 2039 intended to kill his past counterpart to use as an organ donor for himself - specifically citing the earlier principle that it is possible to kill your own grandfather or your own younger self in the "past", because this "past" timeline is really a branching timeline that starts out as an exact duplicate of the original from the point you arrived. That is, it seems the elder Third Timeline Kellog's plan was that sending Brad Tonkin back in time indeed did create a branching "Fourth Timeline", and thus killing "Fourth Timeline Kellog" would not result in his own death.

A possible way to reconcile this discrepancy is that sending back Brad and the combat armored soldiers was considered essentially one "time travel event", comparable to how the initial time travel event at the scheduled Liber8 execution in 2077 did not send people back to the exact same date, but scattered them across several weeks (and in some cases, decades). Thus when Kagame materialized a few weeks after the rest of Liber8 did, due to standing farther away from the time machine when it activated, he didn't create yet another separate timeline. In this case there are in fact four major timelines and not five or more.

References